


Don't Say Anything

by WulfenOne



Series: Steel Reign [3]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Angst, Drunkenness, F/F, First Kiss, Flashback, Love Confessions, Masturbation, Masturbation Interruptus, Mid-Canon, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 15:36:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15318648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WulfenOne/pseuds/WulfenOne
Summary: Piper Wright is desperately in love with the Sole Survivor, but she has no idea if the feeling's mutual. Getting drunk and trying to forget her troubles seems like a good idea, but reality is not so simple.





	Don't Say Anything

**Author's Note:**

> This one-shot takes place during the earlier stages of the actual game itself, before the fight against the Institute has begun in earnest. I know I seem to be working backwards with these one-shots in comparison to the ongoing narrative of Atom's Glow, but time-skips set afterwards will be coming at some point as well.

_Don’t say anything, Piper. It’s not worth the pain._

It had been six months since she had met Rachel, that enigmatic stranger in a Vault-suit outside the gates of Diamond City, and Piper’s life had never been the same since. She’d shamelessly used the raven-haired wasteland wanderer as her express ticket back inside the city walls, and, scenting the prospect of a new article, had then coaxed out of her the story of how she’d wound up on the doorstep of the “Great Green Jewel”. Once she’d done that, she’d offered to follow her new story around on her travels, which had taken the pair of them from one end of the Commonwealth to the other, fighting all kinds of battles against all kinds of bad guys, from annoying bloatflies to monstrous deathclaws – the woman she’d simply dubbed “Blue” had even helped out a mating pair of the massive murder-lizards by returning their one surviving egg to them from the Museum of Witchcraft. Piper still didn’t exactly know what had spurred her to take such a course of action when there had been a substantial stack of caps waiting for the egg with Wellingham, the stuffy and condescending Mr Handy in charge of serving patrons at the Colonial Taphouse in the city’s upper stands, but she had been strangely touched by the gesture nonetheless.

It had been six months, and Piper had been hopelessly in love with Blue for about five of them.

She knew it was a bad idea to even _think_ about expressing any interest in her new friend, considering she didn’t actually know whether Blue liked girls in the same way she liked girls, but it was impossible for her _not_ to think about saying something. The dating pool in Diamond City was small enough as it was – not counting Carrie, her only really serious girlfriend since arriving in the city, Piper had probably been on at least one date with every like-minded girl inside the city limits. Polly from Choice Chops had been the most fun, but she wasn’t really the type to want to settle down, and had made sure Piper knew that from day one. It really had only been a matter of time, though, before Piper had begun wanting more, so Polly had bluntly told her nothing like that was going to happen, and that had been the end of that.

_Don’t say anything, Piper. She had a husband and a kid. There’s no way she’d be into you._

Right now Piper was sitting in the Dugout Inn, nursing her first vodka-and-Nuka-Cola of the evening. Since Nat was staying with friends tonight, she had taken the opportunity to drown her sorrows in as much cheap alcohol as possible, after first sating her hunger with some of Takahashi’s noodles  – she supposed being miserable in public beat being miserable at home, if only by a hair. Maybe she might be able to scribble down some notes for the next edition of _Publick Occurrences_ , too; Blue had told her the other day about how she and the Minutemen had retaken the Castle and slaughtered a gigantic mirelurk queen at the same time, and Piper knew that stories about battles with giant monsters always shifted papers – people always enjoyed reading about how someone ordinary overcame insurmountable odds and triumphed against the many oversized horrors of the wasteland. They certainly seemed to enjoy them more than her usual content, that was for sure.

_Don’t say anything, Piper. She’ll just push you away._

“Hey, little lady,” said a voice over her shoulder. “Mind if I buy you a drink?”

Piper rolled her eyes at the unwelcome interruption, and turned in her seat to find a man she’d never seen before standing behind her, a smile on his face and a bag full of caps jangling in his hand. His rugged clothing and sunburnt skin told her he was probably some kind of wasteland trader stopping over in Diamond City before moving on to some other settlement. “Let me stop you right there, cowboy,” she began, her words edged in tight-lipped indignation. “Don’t waste your time or your caps on me. You are _really_ not my type.”

“Come on, not even just one drink?” the man said, shaking the bag of caps again as if he thought his money might change her mind. “You might like me more once you get to know me better.”

“I really won’t,” Piper retorted. “Trust me on that one.”

“How do you know you won’t if you won’t even talk to me?” the trader said with a shrug that he clearly hoped looked charming.

“Because I’m gay, you colossal fucking _jackass_ ,” Piper snapped bluntly, frustration hanging thickly in her voice. This was unfortunately far from the first time she’d had to fend off a would-be suitor unwilling to take no for an answer, and it had got very old a _very_ long time ago. She sighed, rubbing at her forehead with two fingers. “Look, cowboy… just move along and we’ll both be much happier, okay?” She shifted her coat aside for a moment, very obviously flashing the holster of the large-calibre pistol Blue had generously entrusted to her a couple of weeks previously.

The not-so-subtle gesture had the desired effect as all of the colour drained from the man’s face and he retreated back into the crowd almost as quickly, his movements panicky and staccato. Piper felt a brief twinge of dark amusement before her foul mood clamped down on her mind again like a vice. Turning back to her drink she slugged the remainder of it back in one go, and slammed the glass down on the bar triumphantly. “Reload me,” she said, pushing it towards Vadim along with another handful of caps, which he quickly palmed and slipped into the rusty till behind the bar.

“Of course, Miss Piper,” he said in his usual relentlessly-jaunty tone, “but do not overdo it, you hear? I do not want to be renting room out to you again so soon after last time. You know how long it took to clean up after you? A long time! Yefim did not speak to me for whole month after he had finished with mop and bucket!”

“Don’t worry, Vadim, I’m not going to get that blitzed again,” Piper replied, mustering a momentary half-smile. “Not right away, anyway. Cheers.” She raised her freshly-filled glass in a mock-toast and took a gulp from it, enjoying the burning sensation as she swallowed. Anything to distract her from her dilemma-that-actually-wasn’t-a-dilemma-at-all.

_Don’t say anything, Piper. Save yourself the pain for once._

 

* * *

 

_Don’t say anything, Piper. Life’s too short to waste your time on someone who’ll never think about you the way you think about her._

Closing time at the Dugout came far sooner than Piper had expected. When Vadim had begun shooing patrons out the door so he could close up for the night, she had quickly handed Yefim a few caps so he could give her an unopened bottle of vodka for the road. She tucked it into one of the inner pockets of her coat and stumbled very unevenly out of the bar into the cold night air. The abrupt change of temperature hit her with a wave of nausea that almost made her throw up, but she managed to just about keep her stomach in check for the suddenly-too-long trip back to her house. When she reached her door, she began to fumble with her key, trying and failing to put it into the lock a couple of times before she was finally able to get inside. Then she almost crawled up her rickety staircase, removed the vodka bottle from her coat, threw that same coat into a corner without a second thought and then flopped down onto the ratty mattress in what she laughably called her bedroom. Propping herself up on her elbows and then leaning back against the wall at the head of the mattress, she unscrewed the bottle’s cap and took a long swig from it, once again savouring the feeling of liquid fire flowing down into her belly. The hangover she would inevitably get from it was going to be brutal, she knew, but in truth she didn’t really care about that right now. All she wanted was not to feel so completely alone.

For a single fleeting moment, she considered staggering up to the upper stands, banging on Carrie’s door and begging her to take her back, to run away with her then and there, to get as far away from the Commonwealth as possible, to help her wrap her pain and longing in a crumpled copy of her crappy paper and then leave it all behind… but the thought vanished as soon as it appeared. There was no escaping from this, no matter how much she might want to.

_Don’t say anything, Piper. Don’t tell her that you love her._

She sucked down another sizeable measure of vodka, swishing it around her mouth for a moment while she reflected bitterly on that statement. _I love her. Oh God, I_ ** _love_** _her. I love her and she’ll never know. She’ll never know because I’m too much of a fucking_ ** _coward_** _to say a single fucking word._

Yet another mouthful of vodka. Every drop was becoming easier to take than the last, it seemed.

She rolled onto her side, feeling her stomach lurch a little, and grabbed the lighter and half-empty pack of cigarettes she kept at her bedside, resuming her former position before slipping one into her mouth and flicking open the lighter to ignite it. Taking a deep drag, she held the smoke in her lungs for a moment before she let it billow lazily from between her lips, a twisting grey column that rose slowly toward the corrugated ceiling. She alternated swigs of vodka with pulls on her cigarette until it had burnt completely down to the filter, at which point she exhaled one last swell of smoke and then crushed the dying butt out in the overflowing ashtray next to the bed.

Against her will, she wondered where Blue was right now.

_Probably off somewhere with that bitch Cait,_ she thought sourly, before immediately berating herself for thinking it. She didn’t hate Cait – hell, she didn’t even really _dislike_ her, despite the fact that the Irish brawler was relentlessly brash and mouthy and unafraid (even eager) to offend people – but it still stung a little not to be the one who Blue picked for whatever she planned to do on any given day. She wanted to be around Blue all the time, even if it hurt not to be able to express her feelings as fully as she wished she could. 

As so often happened in times like these, she found herself involuntarily remembering when she had first seen Blue outside of her dusty, battered Vault-suit – it had been a particularly warm day in Sanctuary Hills and Piper had just got back from a trip down to Abernathy Farm, where she had interviewed Blake and Connie Abernathy about their daughter Mary’s death at the hands of a raider gang, and how Blue had recovered the girl’s locket from that very same gang with no expectation of a reward – in other words, a nice little inspirational story that would shift a few papers. When she had returned to the ruined neighbourhood, she had found Blue stripped down to just a pair of torn jeans and a grimy tank-top which showed off the large dragon tattoo spreading across her upper back, up to her elbows in grease and oil as she worked on her damaged suit of scavenged power armour. A thin sheen of sweat had coated her upper arms while she welded closed some of the more obvious rends in the armour’s segmented carapace, and then replaced any broken components with something from the sizeable stack of seemingly random junk she had piled next to her. Her hair had been longer then, so it had been tied back and hung between her shoulder-blades, secured with a plain blue ribbon, and her muscles had been much less well-defined than they would later become under the watchful eye of the Brotherhood of Steel. In short, she wasn’t the kind of girl Piper usually went for, at least cosmetically… but that was definitely the moment when her interest had been irreversibly piqued.

Making the excuse that she was looking for a second interview to publish in a future edition of _Publick Occurrences,_ she had asked Blue why it was that she was so accomplished at fixing electronics and technical systems, and she had simply replied that her mother had been an engineer, who had diligently taught her how to tinker with various gadgets and household devices. She had even showed her daughter how to disassemble and rebuild a Mr Handy one time, although Blue did go on to say that she didn’t trust her memory nearly enough to try to repair her own house-robot’s increasingly-eccentric internal systems. 

Piper had actually been quite relieved about that. She rather liked Codsworth the way he was. 

The more answers Piper got, though, the more questions she wanted to ask – and the more time she spent around the sole survivor of Vault 111, the more time she wasted trying not to think about how beautiful and enticing she was. Her laugh was intoxicating – all the more so because she had laughed so little at that point – and her smile never failed to light up Piper’s broken heart.

And every night when they were apart, or when they were working together and she thought Blue was asleep, Piper would indulge her thoughts, lying awake and wishing that she could just kiss her, if only just for the one time.

_Fucking hell._

The thought of Blue’s lips ghosting across her own was the final straw. She thumbed open her pants and kicked them carelessly across the floor, before she slid her right hand down past her navel, under the band at the front of her underwear and into the dark curls at her crotch, feeling her way towards her centre. Her fingers traced well-practiced trails along the surface of her clit, the sensitive nub of flesh already swollen and aching to be touched. She had had so much practice at this that her movements were almost automatic, her free hand moving to urgently caress the nipple of her left breast, tweaking it roughly through the thin fabric of her t-shirt, almost until it hurt – the good kind of hurt, the hurt she felt she deserved for thinking of her friend this way. Circling her sex with the tips of two fingers, she felt a familiar slickness growing between her legs as she imagined Blue’s hands on her hips, Blue’s mouth on hers, Blue’s tongue on her pussy. She spread herself wide, feeling the wetness coating her fingertips as she eased one and then the other inside herself, curling them deliberately and sending jagged shivers up her spine. She moved her other hand to brush against her clit, slowly but steadily increasing the frequency of strokes across it until she finally felt her release, her hips bucking as she came. She called Blue’s name almost against her will as she felt herself clenching around her fingers, unable to stop herself from wishing Blue was there with her.

When the last waves of pleasure had subsided, she felt a familiar sensation of self-loathing settling around her thoughts again. Why was she torturing herself like this? She wiped her fingers glumly on her handkerchief and laid flat on the bed, staring regretfully at the ceiling until sleep finally claimed her.

   

* * *

 

The morning brought more pain than usual. As soon as Piper opened her eyes, the hangover she had fully expected hit her between the eyes like a thunderbolt, her head ringing loudly with dull, persistent agony.

_Good job, Piper,_ she told herself sourly, every thought like a rusty nail jamming itself into the middle of her brain. _What would Nat think if she could see you now?_

That wasn’t something she wanted to dwell on right at that moment, though. With a lot of effort she pushed herself up onto her elbows, feeling the contents of her skull sloshing around angrily as she did so, and then dragged herself to her feet, not bothering to dress herself in anything other than what she had been wearing the night before, since she was alone in the house and nobody else would see her. Before she did anything else today, however, she would have to take a few of the painkillers she kept safely stored in one of the cupboards downstairs, just to try to make her headache subside a little. Then she could change and go back to pretending everything was fine and dandy again.

When she finally managed to make her way downstairs, she turned towards the cupboards in what passed for her kitchen – and immediately yelped in shock as she saw Blue standing silently in front of the stove Piper had recently installed to replace her ageing hot plate, a pan full of mirelurk omelette sizzling away quietly as her unexpected guest sprinkled some seasoning onto it. “Good morning,” Blue said, not turning away from the stove. “Did you sleep well?”

“Did I – “ Piper began, her voice catching in her throat for a moment. “Jesus Christ, Blue! How’d you get in here?” she asked once she’d caught her breath.

“You gave me a key, remember?” Blue said casually, still not turning around. “I figured that meant I could come and see you whenever I was in town. Is that not okay?”

“No, it’s not fucking okay!” Piper snapped, her head feeling like a railroad spike had been fired right through the centre of her brain. “This is my house, Blue! At least give me some goddamn warning before you show up in the middle of the night!” She took a deep breath, rubbing a vein that had suddenly begun throbbing at her temple. “Sorry, I had a rough night. Kinda hungover.”

Blue turned her head just enough to look at Piper and after giving Piper’s dishevelled appearance a cursory glance, raised a single eyebrow. “I can see that. You look like you got dragged through a hedge backwards.” She reached up into one of the cupboards above her head and picked out a bottle of pills before pivoting on her heel to toss them gently at Piper. “Here, take a couple of these. Doctor’s orders.”

_Great. Now she’ll think I’m a drunk on top of everything else._

“So when did you get here?” Piper asked after she had caught the bottle and up-ended it to take out two circular tablets, which she crunched between her teeth and then dry-swallowed with a grimace. She figured she was probably on the verge of puking anyway, so the state the painkillers were in when they reached her stomach likely wouldn’t make much of a difference. 

“About midnight,” Blue replied. “I figured I wouldn’t come up and say hi at that kind of hour, so I just slept on your couch instead. I hope that’s okay, at least?”

Upon hearing Blue’s arrival time, Piper’s blood suddenly ran cold as a very unpleasant possibility wormed its way into her mind, before she realised she was supposed to reply to Blue’s question.

“Yes, that’s fine,” she stuttered. “Thank you for thinking of me.”

_Don’t say anything, Piper. She might not have heard anything._

“You’re welcome,” Blue began, still stirring the omelette gently before she spooned two portions onto some plates and set them down on the table along with some knives and forks. “Come and have some breakfast. It’ll help the hangover, I promise.”

“Thanks, Blue,” Piper said, taking a seat and enjoying the scent of the piping hot food even through her headache and restless stomach. “This smells really good.”

“Hopefully it tastes as good as it smells,” Blue said as she sat down opposite Piper and dug her fork into the creamy, green-tinted substance that was heaped on her plate. “So,” she began, not shifting her attention from her omelette, “when exactly were you thinking about telling me that you love me?”

_Oh, fuck._ Blue's words hit her like a sledgehammer. 

“I don’t – I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Piper said, painfully aware of how transparent she sounded.

“I heard you say it last night, Piper,” Blue said, briefly raising her eyes to meet Piper’s gaze. “It was hard for me _not_ to – you weren’t exactly being quiet when I came in, you know.” She laughed that intoxicating laugh again. “Probably why you didn’t hear me lying down on the couch." 

_Oh, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK FUCK_ **_FUCK!_ **

“Besides,” Blue continued, casually returning her attention to her breakfast, “it’s not like you told me anything I didn’t already know.”

Dumbfounded, Piper could only gawp while her cheeks burned with humiliation and shame. “You… knew? For how long?”

“Not that long,” Blue admitted, shrugging. “Cait only mentioned it to me a little while ago. I think she thought she was doing you a favour.”

“But I never said anything to Cait, I swear,” Piper said, hurriedly. “I –”

“Cait told me the same thing,” Blue continued before Piper could flounder any more. “She said that she knew the way you always look at people when you like them. She also said that she’d noticed you looking at me like that for a while, but she’d kept quiet about it because she didn’t want me to feel weird around you. _Then_ she said that after seeing you not make a move for months, she thought you were too scared so she decided to do it for you.”

_Fucking Cait. I’ll_ ** _kill_** _her. If I don’t die of embarrassment first…_

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything, Blue,” Piper stammered. “If you don’t want to be around me anymore I’ll understand.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to be around you, Piper?” Blue asked, a puzzled expression crossing her perfect features. “You’re my friend. I _like_ being around you.”

_Friend?_ The word felt like a blunt corkscrew being twisted directly into the centre of Piper’s soul.

“Just so you know, though,” Blue said, in between bites of food, “you’re not the first girl to say she loved me. Sometimes I even said it back.”

Piper’s stomach churned so hard she almost threw up. “What?” she said, swallowing her discomfort as best she could. “But I thought you were –”

“You thought I was completely straight because I married a man and then had a kid with him,” Blue finished, a weary edge to her voice. “You wouldn’t be the first person to think that, but I’ll tell you a secret: the first person I ever loved was a girl. Her name was Mary, and we dated for about a year after I turned eighteen. I was crazy about her, but as it turned out she didn’t feel the same in the end, so she dumped me for someone prettier – on Valentine’s Day, of all days. Can you believe that? That was the first time I got my heart broken, and I was in pieces for months… and then Nate happened. I was working in a diner close to the military base where he was stationed to help pay my way through college, and he would come in every day at 3pm sharp and order the same thing: plain black coffee, no sugar, no cream. He’d always take far too long to drink it, so I always had to fix him another when it inevitably got cold. Didn’t take long for everyone else to work out he was coming in for me, not the coffee, but I had no idea until my friend Liz finally said something. Guess I’m not good at knowing when anybody likes me, am I?” She laughed, and against all odds, Piper did too. The relief cancelled out the sudden spike of pain the laugh caused at her temples. “Then one day he just… stopped coming in. We didn’t speak for months until I randomly bumped into him on my way to work. I was so happy to see him again that I had to ask him how he was doing, and why he wasn’t coming to see me anymore. Turned out one of his old squad-mates had seen me out dancing with Mary one time and had told him about her, so he thought I was gay, and decided to bail rather than make a fool of himself. I’ll never forget the look on his face when I told him that I’d been waiting for him to ask me out on a date.” A smile rippled across her lips for a moment. “It was exactly like the one on your face now.”

Piper felt even more heat flooding into her cheeks and she raised her hand to her face almost by reflex alone. She hadn’t felt this bewildered and confused for a long time. “What?” was all she could find to say, and she immediately cursed herself for her completely inadequate response.

“Speechless, huh?” Blue said, with another lopsided smile. “I think that’s the first time that’s happened since I’ve known you.” She put her fork down on her empty plate and then reached out to grasp one of Piper’s small hands, the gun-oil-stained calluses on her fingertips warm and rough against Piper’s skin. “I guess I’ll keep talking for the both of us, then. Cait telling me how you felt made me think long and hard about how I felt about you. How I’d been feeling for a while, actually.” Still grasping Piper’s hand, she stood up and drew Piper close. “Can I tell you another secret?”

“Of… of course,” Piper stuttered. Her heart was beating so hard that it felt like it was trying to punch its way out of her chest.

“Okay, then. Brace yourself, because this is a big one,” Blue said, moving some stray hair out of Piper’s face. Leaning forward so that her mouth was next to Piper’s ear, she whispered “I love you too. Took some time for me to realise it, but I do. I love you.”

Piper was too stunned to react before Blue took her face between her palms and tenderly kissed her, her lips soft and gentle against Piper’s own. It was better than Piper could have ever imagined, and she had imagined a lot. It took her a moment to gather enough composure to lift her arms and wrap them around Blue’s neck, drawing the older woman closer, at last able to let go of the weight that had been crushing her for months. She had never felt so free as she did in Blue’s embrace.

The sound of the front door opening abruptly shattered the moment she’d waited so long for, as both she and Blue turned to see who had come in unannounced. It was Nat, returning from her friend’s house, a small bag of clothes over one shoulder and some ragged-edged comics under her arm. She took one look at her sister enveloped in the arms of the vault-dweller and rolled her eyes. _“Finally,”_ she said, before she walked over to the stove and looked at what was left of the omelettes. “So what’s for breakfast?”


End file.
